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A Broadcaster With Something to Say

Tim McCarver’s broadcasting career started in 1980 without much guidance from Harry Kalas and Richie Ashburn, his senior colleagues in the Philadelphia Phillies booth.

“Harry did his job, and that alone, just listening to his cadence, his rhythm, that was enough,” McCarver said by telephone from Cooperstown, N.Y., where he will be honored Saturday afternoon as the winner of the annual Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting. But Ashburn’s advice was: “Pal, if you don’t have anything to say, then don’t say it, and I said: ‘That’s easy. I wouldn’t say anything if I didn’t have anything to say.’ ”

McCarver rarely lacks for something to say, a reflection of his innate enthusiasm and desire to educate viewers as he was schooled with the St. Louis Cardinals. Over 32 years — locally with the Phillies, the Mets, the Yankees and the Giants, and nationally with NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox — he has created a style that blends analysis born from his 21 years in a catcher’s crouch, with historical references, groan-worthy puns, a tendency to hammer some points and savvy first-guessing before plays unfold.

“All I did was announce the game the way I thought it should be, and I found very early on that my observations were different from others,” he said. “Not better or worse, just different.” As a catcher looking out at the field, he said, “you visualized without realizing it that this choreography was going on behind the pitcher, where you inadvertently learned all the positions and their responsibilities.”

One day in the mid-1980s, he said, he asked Bill Webb, the longtime Mets TV director, if he could capture a shot of a shortstop, with his glove up to his face, silently telling the second baseman who would cover second on a ground ball hit to the pitcher. The shortstop’s closed mouth meant he would cover; his open mouth meant the second baseman would.

“Between innings,” McCarver said, “Webbie said, ‘Is this what you’re talking about?’ ” — a shot of the shortstop gesturing to the second base from the high first-base camera. “I said, ‘How many times have you seen that?’ He said, “I’ve never seen that.’ ”

But the shot became routine enough on baseball telecasts that three years later, during a playoff series on ABC, Al Michaels said, “We’ve seen that so many times.”

Early in their years together, Michaels said that he asked McCarver if he minded that he layered his play-by-play with analysis. Michaels, speaking from London, said: “Tim said, ‘Absolutely not, I love it because it gives me a brand new palette so I can go somewhere else.’ He embraced it, and I could take the rudimentary analysis out of play and hand him the baton.”

Before McCarver’s broadcasting was a major league career that started when the Cardinals signed him at age 17. But he was nearly a Yankee. He was scouted at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis by Bill Dickey, the Yankee Hall of Fame catcher. Dickey tried to woo the McCarvers by bringing fresh catfish from his home in Little Rock, Ark. Dickey knew the Cardinals had the edge on the Yankees, who already had catchers Elston Howard and Yogi Berra and were eyeing another, Jake Gibbs.

Photo

The broadcaster Tim McCarver in Cooperstown, where he will be honored as the Ford C. Frick Award winner on Saturday.Credit
Stewart Cairns for The New York Times

“Bill was very persuasive and made it very difficult for me,” McCarver said. The Yankees offered $68,000. The Cardinals proposed a $75,000 bonus and guaranteed salary of $6,000 for five years.

Signing with the Cardinals let McCarver establish deep connections to pitchers Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton, whose link to McCarver grew stronger when both played in Philadelphia. Carlton’s induction in 1994 was the reason that McCarver last traveled to Cooperstown. At a dinner the night before the ceremony, the host, George Grande, asked McCarver to talk about the left-handed Carlton.

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McCarver recalled saying: “If Carl Hubbell goes down in the history of baseball for having the best screwball, if Sandy Koufax goes down as having the best curve, and Nolan Ryan goes down as arguably having the best fastball, then Steve Carlton will go down as having the best slider in the game.”

Then, he added: “I looked over his shoulder and this very familiar figure was swimming his way through the crowd. It was Gibson. And No. 45 gets about four inches from my face and said, ‘The best left-handed slider in the history of the game.’ He made his point, skulked away and giggled.”

If anything cemented McCarver’s role as a premier analyst, it was joining the Mets’ broadcasting crew in 1983. McCarver was becoming known nationally — he called games for NBC in ’80 and ’81, and was hired at ABC Sports in ’84, four years after failing an audition there — but he joined the Mets as they were building their credibility on the way to winning the ’86 World Series.

“Looking back, it was the right time, but I didn’t feel that way at the time,” he said. “Having Strawberry come up in May, and then they made the deal for Keith Hernandez.” Mets General Manager Frank Cashen, McCarver said, telephoned him at his apartment in New Jersey and asked what he knew about Hernandez. “I said: ‘Well, he’s some player. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a first baseman his equal defensively, and he’s a good hitter.’ ”

McCarver spent 16 seasons with the Mets — “the most exciting years of my professional life” — in a delightful booth partnership with Ralph Kiner, whose stories, humor and historical gravitas have long merged with his malaprops, mispronunciations and memory lapses. Kiner called McCarver “Sid,” “Ted” and “Jim,” and “Tim MacArthur,” too. Sometimes, Kiner simply forgot his friend’s name (and his own).

Kiner once had to describe the entrance of a San Diego Padres reliever while satisfying a sponsor, American Cyanamid. McCarver had checked the sponsor lineup beforehand, saw the company’s name and said, “Oh boy, that’s tough to pronounce.” And, he added, “Sure enough, Ralph said, ‘The Padres make a pitching change, and this is brought to you by American Cyanide.’

McCarver has called a record 22 World Series and 21 All-Star Games. But it has been his insights, not his longevity, that earned him the Hall of Fame’s Frick Award. But, Michaels believes, longevity is partly responsible for some of the barbed criticism his friend has received in recent years.

“He’s been doing almost all the big games,” he said. “He was the guy you got, period.”

How long McCarver will continue to broadcast baseball at Fox, or anywhere else, is not known. He has a year left with Fox, the same time left on Fox’s baseball contract. “I have certainly thought about it,” said McCarver, who is 70. “Could be, whoever wins the next contract is looking for another demographic.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 21, 2012, on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Broadcaster With Something to Say. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe